Column: Building community in a country of strangers

By Connie Schultz

Published: Friday, November 1, 2013 at 08:38 PM.

Last week, about 50 baby boomers and a handful of younger people gathered at the national headquarters of the United Church of Christ in downtown Cleveland to discuss where we’ve landed, so far, on the issue of faith.

Put 50 people — any 50 people — in a room and ask them what they think of God and you’ll get 50 different stories about 50 different journeys. This meeting — held on a weekday morning in the Amistad Chapel and convened by a friend of mine, the Rev. Kathryn Matthews Huey — was no different.

At the beginning, it seemed the only thing we had in common was a genuine desire to talk about why we believe what we believe. That was more than enough for a lively and thoughtful conversation.

By the end of the hour and a half, though, it was clear that most of us shared another goal. We wanted to figure out how to build community — within or without a house of worship — in a country that often feels inhabited by strangers.

It’s not news that Americans are increasingly polarized and that we are willfully isolating ourselves into hamlets of sameness. We also are distancing ourselves from one another.

Back in 2006, a National Science Foundation study reported that a quarter of Americans said they didn’t have a single confidant, which was more than double the number of similarly isolated in 1985. The number who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped from 19 percent to 8 percent.

Last week, about 50 baby boomers and a handful of younger people gathered at the national headquarters of the United Church of Christ in downtown Cleveland to discuss where we’ve landed, so far, on the issue of faith.

Put 50 people — any 50 people — in a room and ask them what they think of God and you’ll get 50 different stories about 50 different journeys. This meeting — held on a weekday morning in the Amistad Chapel and convened by a friend of mine, the Rev. Kathryn Matthews Huey — was no different.

At the beginning, it seemed the only thing we had in common was a genuine desire to talk about why we believe what we believe. That was more than enough for a lively and thoughtful conversation.

By the end of the hour and a half, though, it was clear that most of us shared another goal. We wanted to figure out how to build community — within or without a house of worship — in a country that often feels inhabited by strangers.

It’s not news that Americans are increasingly polarized and that we are willfully isolating ourselves into hamlets of sameness. We also are distancing ourselves from one another.

Back in 2006, a National Science Foundation study reported that a quarter of Americans said they didn’t have a single confidant, which was more than double the number of similarly isolated in 1985. The number who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped from 19 percent to 8 percent.

That was seven years ago.

Two years ago, I wrote about the US 2010 study, conducted by Stanford University and funded by Russell Sage and Brown University, which offered even worse snapshots of America’s communities.

Middle-income neighborhoods were dwindling, from 65 percent in 1970 to 44 percent in 2007. The affluent were more segregated from other Americans than were the poor, raising dire questions about the social mobility of children.

There was a time when houses of worship filled the gap as conveners of diverse populations. Like many baby boomers, I remember when bankers, welders, teachers and cashiers sat in the same pews and prayed to the same God. They made eye contact. They knew one another’s names.

That’s changed, too.

As recently as June 2011, 9 in 10 Americans still answered yes when Gallup asked, “Do you believe in God?” The following year, however, Gallup asked about Americans’ confidence in organized religion, and the numbers told a different story. The majority of Americans may still believe in God, but only 44 percent still had faith in religious institutions.

In our discussion at the UCC chapel, Kate Huey said she’s long thought the boomer generation launched the movement from “religious” to “spiritual.” Anecdotally, that bears out among the boomers I know and seems true for wide swaths of subsequent generations, too.

Many of us hold dear a more inclusive version of faith, but we have failed to build a community around our good intentions. Isolation has a way of sneaking up on you, too. That was certainly true for me.

Last month, my husband and I moved from a suburb of glorious lawns and big houses set far off the street to a community of much smaller homes in the city of Cleveland. It’s an “intentional neighborhood,” as one of the residents described it to me, a racial and cultural mix of people practically on top of one another — working-class and professional, gay and straight, young parents and retirees.

You can’t drive into this community of 220-plus homes without noticing the diversity because we’re in plain sight. We live close together — not just side by side but front porch to sidewalk. It takes a dozen steps for me to walk from my front door to the sidewalk. In our old home, that wouldn’t get me to our driveway.

Already I know more neighbors by name than I did after living eight years in the suburbs. I blame no one but myself for the latter, by the way. We lived on a street of kind people, but it was too easy to keep to myself.

Now I can’t avoid running into neighbors. I’m forced to be more outgoing. They wave from their cars and stroll over for conversation when I’m sitting on the porch with the morning newspapers. If I forget to close my garage door at night, almost always I get a kindly reminder.

Community requires intention, and lately I’m aware of just how slow I was to do my part.

Before our move, I told friends it was time to downsize, and that was true.

But the bigger truth, the one I’m no longer ashamed to admit, is that I was lonely.

And I’m not anymore.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine.